Tips on Winning the ecommerce Game

The ecommerce world is constantly changing and evolving, which is exactly why you must keep on top of the game. Arguably, choosing a reliable host is the most important decision that an eCommerce business has, that’s why we have noted 5 major reasons as to why a quality hosting provider is vital.

High Availability

The most important thing to think about when choosing a host and your infrastructure, is “How much is it going to cost me when my site goes down”. If your site is down, especially over a large period of time, you could be losing customers and profits. One way to minimise this is to create a highly available environment on the cloud. This means that there is a ‘redundancy’ plan in place to minimise the chances of your site being offline for even a minute.

SEO Ranking

Having a good SEO ranking isn’t purely based on your content. If your site is extremely slow to load, or doesn’t load at all, the ‘secret Google bots’, will push your site further and further down the results page. We recommend using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) such as Cloudflare to help improve performance.

Security

This may seem like a fairly obvious concern, but making sure you have regular security updates and patches is vital, especially, if credit cards or money transfers are involved on your site. Obviously there is no one way to combat every security concern on the internet, however, making sure you have regular back ups and 24/7 support will help any situation.

Scalability

What happens when you have a sale or run an advertising campaign and suddenly have a flurry of traffic to your site? In order for your site to be able to cope with the new influx, it needs to be scalable. A good hosting provider can make your site scalable so that there is no downtime when your site is hit with a heavy traffic load. Generally, the best direction to follow when scalability is a priority, is the cloud or Amazon Web Services. The best part of it is, not only do you only pay for what you use, but hosting on the Amazon infrastructure also gives you an SLA (Service Level Agreement) of 99.95% uptime guarantee.

Stress-Free Support

Finally, a good hosting provider will take away any stress that is related to hosting. If your site goes down at 3am, you don’t want to be the person having to deal with it. At Anchor, we have a team of expert Sysadmins available 24/7 to take the stress out of keeping your site up and online.

With these 5 points in mind, you can now make 2017 your year, and beat the game that is eCommerce.

If you have security concerns, experiencing slow page loads or even downtime, we can perform a free ecommerce site assessment to help define a hosting roadmap that will allow you to speed ahead of the competition. If you would simply like to learn more about eCommerce hosting on Anchor’s award winning hosting network, simply contact our friendly staff will get back to you ASAP.